NEARLY three decades ago, while engaged in the postgraduate study of American history, I began reading a book of nature writing by Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons, and immediately saw what was missing from my seminars. There was no nature in their history—no sense of the presence and influence of the land on past human experience, no soil, no countryside, no smell of fungus, no sound of spring peepers trilling from the marsh at dusk. Historians seemed to have forgotten completely that, until very recently, almost all people lived as intimately with other species and with the wind and weather as they did with their own kind
